Benazir Bhutto's mother dies 'exiled in Dubai by her son-in-law the president of Pakistan'

Nusrat Bhutto, mother of the late Benazir, the country's only female prime
minister, died lonely in Dubai where she was held incommunicado on the
orders of her son-in-law President Asif Zardari, her family claimed as her
funeral re-opened the bitter rift within the Bhutto clan.

Benazir Bhutto (pictured). The late Pakistan leader's mother has died in DubaiPhoto: REUTERS

Nusrat's grand-daughter, the writer Fatima Bhutto, and her mother Ghinwa, sobbed on Monday and said she had had been forcefully exiled from her surviving family in Pakistan and kept from any contact with them by Mr Zardari.

Fatima Bhutto has long blamed Benazir Bhutto, the two-time former prime minister who was assassinated at an election rally in 2007; and her widower, now President Zardari, for the death of her father and Benazir's brother Mir Murtaza Bhutto. He was shot dead by police outside the family's home in Karachi in 1996 when Benazir Bhutto was prime minister.

Murtaza had accused Mr Zardari of corruption and his sister Benazir of abandoning their father's socialist principles.

Both Benazir Bhutto and Asif Zardari denied both Murtaza's accusations and those of his daughter following his death, but there was no reconciliation.

As the clan members gathered in Larkana, the family's ancestral seat yesterday, Fatima and Ghinwa said they did not know if they would be allowed to attend the funeral, which was being controlled by the Pakistan president and his three children.

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President Zardari had flown to Dubai to bring Nusrat's body back to Larkana where she is expected to be buried alongside her late husband at the family cemetery in Garhi Khuda Baksh. The bodies of Benazir and her two murdered brothers Shah Nawaz and Mir Murtaza are also buried there.

"[She was] taken away from her home, what more can I say? She doesn't leave from her house. She doesn't live in her house," said Fatima, who recounted the story of her father's killing and the breakdown of Bhutto family relations which followed it in her acclaimed memoir Songs of Blood and Sword.

In the book she wrote of how, soon after her father's killing, Nusrat, who was widow of the late Pakistan prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was whisked away from her home by Benazir Bhutto and not allowed to see her, her brother Zulfikar or their mother Ghinwa, again.

"We never saw our grandmother again. Joonam [Nusrat] is now held incommunicado by the Zardaris in a garish house in Dubai...We are not permitted to speak to our ailing grandmother, not allowed to visit her and not allowed to care for her as she wastes away alone, minded by maids and strangers and various Zardari clan members," she wrote.

Her mother repeated the charge last night. "[She died] outside of her country, outside of her home, and why? Because of Zardari's wishes, that's why," she said.